Amazon planning Australian datacentre: Report

Amazon’s Web Services cloud computing division is planning to open a new datacentre hosted in Australia next year, according to an article published in the Australian newspaper this morning.

Amazon has speedily become one of the largest players in the burgeoning global cloud computing market since it launched its Web Services division in mid-2006. A wide number of online services are available through the service, ranging from the provision of storage, virtual compute instances, content delivery, databases and more.

In that time the company is not known to have deployed any local infrastructure or staff in Australia, with local organisations primarily accessing datacentres located in countries such as Singapore or the US to use Amazon’s services. However, all that may be about to change, according to The Australian.

This morning the newspaper reported that a local datacentre was slated to be unveiled by early 2012, with up to three sites in Sydney on the selection list, and one datacentre provider being Equinix.

A spokesperson for the company this morning declined to provide any substantial information about the company’s plans. “We do not comment on rumours or speculations,” said Regina Tan, AWS’ public relations chief for its Asia Pacific and Japan region. “Over time, we plan to have more datacentres in different countries and regions around the world. Our Australia-based customers are successfully using datacentres in our current 5 Regions – US East, US West, EU-Ireland, APAC-Singapore and APAC-Tokyo.”

The company will hold a series of events across Sydney and Melbourne, which will feature as their Vogels, who has played a key role at Amazon over the past decade and is one of the company’s most senior executives. Vogels will be flanked by the company’s Singapore-based Asia-Pacific managing director of its Amazon Web Services cloud division, as well as several other executives.

The event marks one of the first occasions over the past several years where Amazon executives have spoken publicly in Australia with respect to local usage of their growing cloud computing platform.

Amazon Web Services is popular amongst Australian startups, who see the storage and hosting platform as a reliable and inexpensive building block to aid them in building new online systems which may be required to scale up dramatically as customer usage expands rapidly.

Amazon’s visit Down Under comes as the trend against global cloud giants building Australia-based datacentres shows some signs of shifting.

Salesforce.com confirmed in mid-May this year that it was confirming the case for when to build a local datacentre, with global CEO Marc Benioff saying a locat datacentre was not a matter of “an if”, but “a when”. SAP partner Oxygen late last month revealed plans to sell a complete software as a service platform locally based on a hosted SAP suite, while Oracle has confirmed plans to sell its CRM on demand product through a Sydney-based datacentre hosted by Harbour MSP.

NBN will be some kind of factor, but Renai is right that available data centre space in Australia scarce at the moment, and therefore comes at a premium.

It’s why we’ve seen such a flurry of new DCs springing up of late. Plenty of demand, not a lot of supply.

If the Amazon thing is true, and if it’s at Equinix, they’ve obviously done a sweet deal for the new space they have been building.

Equinix is so well placed just near Sydney airport – I know of Victorian companies who haven’t been able to get the space they required in Melbourne, who’ve set up at Equinix – just so they can fly in and get there quickly and easy, do what they have to do, and get out quickly.

Far from ideal, but just an illustration of the DC market, particularly in Melbourne over the last five or six years.

Better connectivity in the SME market which NBN will bring will increase demand for cloud services and data centre space. The main prevent me from shifting some of our services to clouds services and off site servers is lack of available reliable bandwidth at our business premises. I’ve got black fibre sitting here that I know is run to the nearest Telstra exchange do you think I could get them to even acknowledge it exists let alone try to shift our connectivity of multiple ADSL links onto it.

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Written by Delimiter Publisher Renai LeMay, The Frustrated State is the first in-depth book examining of how Australia’s political sector is systematically mismanaging technological change and crushing hopes that our nation will ever take its rightful place globally as a digital powerhouse and home of innovation.

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